Zuihitsu, 2024-01

Technically, zuihitsu are longer reflections than what I tend to collect. But, the general idea is right. Here’s this month’s installment. If you want the complete set, please download the fortune file.

Ask a great question and the article will write itself.
To govern is to choose.—Nigel Lawson
Don’t waste precious time trying to prove someone else wrong.
What is the flavor of your life?
In a world powered by Artificial Intelligence, who makes the hard decisions?
Are you being kind or are you salving your guilt?
Dreams and romance grow in mystery and uncertainty.
Maintenance is one of the commandments of good engineering.
Don’t analyze, utilize.
People have three faces: one for strangers, one for friends, and one they never show anyone – the true self.
Fine-tuning or pruning?
Meritocracy: stack ranked according to my preferences.
Everyone is talking their own book.
Everything is a network.
You do not wake up one morning a bad person. It happens by a thousand tiny surrenders of self-respect to self-interest.—Robert Brault
Transform your tomb to chrysalis and emerge.
The goal of learning is not so much answers as better questions.
Many people are committed to the darkness even when exposed to the light.
There are no recipes for success; there is only trial and error.—Carlo Rovelli
The worst thing is not that people lied and no one noticed. It was that people knew it was a lie and it did not matter.
Morality comes after desire.
Picking losers is harder than picking winners.
The only lever to move the future is the present.
No marksman with crooked rifles.
Easier to laugh at a problem that isn’t your responsibility to solve.
If a training is obvious, you are not the target audience.
Investing is not about cash flow.
Avoid crazy at all costs.
Thank your enemies with guest-gifts of pain.
Where are the junctions where temporary reality mets the consensus reality.
All stories are one story, in the end.
Most work is a web rather than a straight line.
The horror of personal smallness is the realization that our life has no meaning in consensus reality.
What is being pushed to the margins?
Transformation, what has to be done to turn one thing into another?
No idea that proposes free money is ever a good idea.
There is a salvation to be found in the ruthless cutting out of bullshit.
Good rules make for good games. Bad rules lead to degeneracy.
Never believe you can solve the impossible equation, the getting of something for nothing.
Any relationship with a tyrant is in the master / slave mode.
Influence clusters.
In a mob, everyone gets a turn.
Write what is written within.
The variance is larger than the mean.
Narrative matters, and it is not always possible to control the narrative.
Truth transcends the visible.
If the why is important, many things become possible.
Where nothing makes sense, cast aside knowledge and only look to what is possible.
Conserve resources. Select where to apply effort, and don’t start something you are not prepared to see through to the end.
Revolutions of style are also revolutions of substance.
Locate meaning in the putatively superficial. Examine the values underpinning artifice.
Assassinations are like birthday presents. It’s the thought that counts.
Confidence comes from preparation.—Kobe Bryant
Narrative follows price.
Time makes more converts than reason.—Thomas Paine
The truth does not require your participation to exist. Bullshit does.—Terence McKenna
Selection and time teaches what should be feared.
You are what you do. Not what you say or what you believe.
Don’t give unsolicited advice. Advice-giving inherently implies unequal status.
Three minutes? Ask a question.
Be strict with yourself and forgiving of others.
Exercise gratitude.
People are busy, distracted, and tired. Always follow up.
Don’t be the smartest person in the room.
Your choices shape your identity, not the other way around.
Character is more important than accomplishments.
Be kind, but be ready to walk.
Self-discipline is more important than motivation.
Conviction is necessary to turn the possible into actual.
Assume nothing is random, but also assume that any apparent connection needs to be substantiated.
Stasis is a poor form of longevity. Engagement, reinterpretation and evolution lead to long term relevance.
Meritocracy, an interesting idea no one wants implemented.
Romantics love the narrative.
The Others are the only ones that need to hide themselves, and everyone is an Other in some contexts.
Some garden. Others sit. A few transform the site into a dump.
The bliss of today leads to the pain of tomorrow, and vice versa.
Doing is learning.
Of Reality, we each experience only a single slice.
Paranoia sells.
If it is just words, let them howl.
Beginnings are easy. It’s knowing when to stop that is often hard.
Not every writer is Homer.
What choice do you make when the stakes are pain?
Questions that trouble the mind are the only questions worth considering.
The gym is a microcosm of life. Good training transfers.
If it is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.
For who can judge, or witness of those times, Where all alike are guilty of the crimes?—John Donne
Power and strength are not the same thing.—Plato
The prime manufacturer can never exceed the capabilities of the least proficient of the suppliers.—John Hart-Smith
Lying is impossible if everything is false.
Poetry is a shotgun aimed at our shared experience.
Too much detail when abstracted could mean anything.
Meaning is as fundamental to talk as matter.
Reality has been replaced with abstraction; the Real has become chosen belief.
The four stages of life are infancy, childhood, adolescence and obsolescence.—Art Linklater
Evolution requires variance. Optimization implies a static environment.
Because indicators direct one’s activities, you should guard against overreacting. This you can do by pairing indicators, so that together both effect and counter-effect are measured.—Andy Grove
Prediction and provocation are not the same thing.
Corruption is power that overflows its bounds.
Viewpoints outside one’s contextual frame are invaluable.
Van Riper Principle: give the job to your best then let them do it without looking over their shoulder.
Friends can be unfeeling and stupid and still be friends when it counts.
The advantage of being old is you have seen most of what happens before.
Without reaching a limit and failing, it is impossible to know the boundaries of the possible.
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.—T. S. Eliot
No meaning outside relationships.
Have you tried solving the problem?
Games with God have no score, only endings.
School the meat. Don’t let the meat school you.
Second trade first.
Are you security, public relations or some other thing?
Choice enables us to become more than what we are.
Electronic intercepts are great, but you don’t know if you’ve got two idiots on the phone.—Martin Peterson, former Executive Director of the CIA
You might not be interested in war, but sometimes, war is interested in you.
Let time toast it for you.
…the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself alone makes for good writing.—Faulkner
Don’t show me. Give me the recipe and I will show myself.
On a local level, (d)evolution is about fitness for survival of an animal, or indeed a species. But on a global level the point of evolution is that it is a parallel algorithm for exploring the many forms of fitness.
Beer on whiskey, mighty risky—Whiskey on beer, never fear.
Life wasn’t simpler when you were a kid. You were simpler when you were a kid.
Economic exclusion is central to social persecution.
Believe as little as possible without becoming a heretic, so that you can obey as little as possible without becoming a rebel.
Money is like heroin for boring people.
They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
Leadership means helping other people with their problems.
Discovery is about walking up to the edge of the familiar and stepping over.
After someone asking for some ridiculous thing from you: I see you mean business.
Put some paint where it ain’t.
Don’t borrow trouble.
Life is lived looking forwards and understood looking backwards.
The opposite of play isn’t work, it’s rote.—Edward Hollowell
Disney characters have a Hug Rule, where they wait for the child to release first. It doesn’t work if everyone does it.
Only Zeus has medicine for everything.—Stobaeus
It ain’t gonna smell better in a week.
We’re in crazyland now, the rules don’t apply.
Put yourself in situations where preparation does not ensure success.
Signal you are playing.
Conventional thinking tends to both sides, either / or thinking.
Crisis reveals character.
Hope clouds observation.
Value is established in the losing.
The primary motivator in a bureaucracy is fear.
The doors of hell are locked from the inside.—C. S. Lewis
That which submits rules.
A world is supported by four things: the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers if the righteous, and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing without a ruler who knows the art of ruling.
Bad shepherds ruin their flocks.—Homer, Odyssey
Imagination is as effortless as perception.—Keith Johnstone
Is it a characteristic of a subgroup or of most people?
The Paradox of Opportunity: so long as we live, there will always be another opportunity. But, opportunities are finite. Good opportunities are both rare and can sometimes be manufactured, a gift of attitude, circumstance, or openness to what the moment offers.
The difference between being imaginative and its opposite often lies in whether we are being judged and whether we care about that judgment.
Contempt is the enemy of judgment.
A smile is not just in your mouth, it is also in your eyes, voice and body language.
Like a broken ceramic, trust can be repaired, but people will always look at the seam.
It could be worse. The dead could return and ask for their stuff back.
What use is money if it cannot buy what you need.

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